Khalti Gets License from Nepal Rastra Bank to Operate as a Payment Service Provider

Khalti is a digital payment service (or whatever they call it technically) that you surely have heard about (they do a lot of advertising). It’s a viable alternative to eSewa and many people seem to like it.

The news today is that Nepal Rastra Bank has finally provided Khalti with a license of Payment Service Provider (PSP) under its ‘Payment and Settlement Bylaw 2072‘ for Wallet Services through telecommunication technology and internet. Along with digital payment services, now Khalti can also provide domestic money transfer facility and mobile financial services in Nepal.

Khalti was launched on 26 January 2017 but it still hadn’t obtained the license. Even eSewa, a similar company founded about 10 years ago, hadn’t gotten its license until very recently. After getting the license, Khalti team has said that they will work even harder to bring Offline services to Online (O2O) to the public.

After being awarded the PSP license by NRB, Manish Modi, Managing Director of Khalti shared,

“Digital payment is a very recent phenomenon in Nepal. Still today, people have to walk for days to reach district headquarters to perform tasks as simple as paying electricity bills. We are excited to get the license from NRB. It has encouraged us to expand digital payments more aggressively across the country. We aim to expand our services in rural and remote parts of Nepal and add different verticals to our platform. We will work to make online payments possible in every corner of the nation to achieve the vision of Digital Nepal. We will work to bring access to finance to the underprivileged population of Nepal and simplify their lives.”

As per Nepal Telecommunication Authority’s latest MIS report, the country has over 132% mobile telephone penetration and 59% broadband internet penetration. Likewise, NRB’s latest statistics show that over 6 million people use mobile banking in Nepal, and the number of internet banking users is around 1 million. However, as per WorldBank’s 2017 Global Findex Database, only 45% of Nepal’s population is banked. So, digital payments systems like Khalti can play a significant role to bring the unbanked population to the digital platform and provide financial services.

Khalti provides various utility bill payment services, mobile recharge, DTH recharge, domestic flight booking, movie ticketing, event ticketing, hotel booking, newspaper subscriptions, and payments at online shopping sites among others. Furthermore, Khalti offers users with cash back on almost every transaction.

Currently, more than 8,00,000 people regularly use Khalti for various bill payments services.